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July 29, 2012

[The Bodo
tribe in the finger of land between Bangladesh and Bhutan has long been feeling squeezed by Muslim Bengalis
immigrating from Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on the
planet. In addition to having less communal ideas about land ownership than the
Bodos, the Bengalis, whose numbers are growing, increasingly threaten the
Bodos’ dream of having an independent state.]

NEW
DELHI — There is a numbing
familiarity to the riots that struck the eastern Indian state of Assam this month, leaving 48 dead and 400,000 people homeless.
The violence had been building for months and even years — thousands of years.

So why, critics ask, were the authorities caught by
surprise despite clear warnings of impending conflict?

“The district authorities should have seen the tension
building up and acted sooner to prevent the kind of violence that we have seen
since,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South
Asia director ofHuman Rights Watch.

The Bodo tribe in the finger of land between Bangladesh and Bhutan has long been feeling squeezed by Muslim Bengalis
immigrating from Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on the
planet. In addition to having less communal ideas about land ownership than the
Bodos, the Bengalis, whose numbers are growing, increasingly threaten the
Bodos’ dream of having an independent state.

The Bodos, many of whom have been converted to
Christianity, now represent just 10 percent of Assam’s population of 31 million, but have ancestral claims to
roughly half of its land.

Four years ago, Bodos and Bengalis, who speak different
languages, clashed in Assam, leaving 70 people dead. Tensions began to build anew on
May 29, when a local Muslim youth group called for a strike in Kokrajhar to
protest the removal of a signboard from a mosque. A series of drive-by killings
followed until generalized violence exploded on July 19.

State officials said they were caught unaware. “We had
requisitioned the army on the very first day, but it took four, five days for
the forces to reach the state,” Tarun Gogoi, chief minister of Assam, said Friday at a news conference.

U. G. Brahma, a former member of Parliament from the
region, said police and other government officials did nothing to stop the
violence for several days. “This is a deliberate act of negligence,” Mr. Brahma
said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Gogoi said no further violence had been reported for at
least two days, although bodies from earlier outbreaks continued to be found
and homes were still being burned.

Mr. Gogoi rejected the charge that the government was slow
in its response and said he had no intelligence before the rioting suggesting
the need for troops. Such riots have been part ofIndia’s history since its
violent birth in 1947, but its roots go back far longer.

Indians’ genetic variability is vast. Scores of languages
are spoken, 15 of which appear on the nation’s currency. The Hindu, Muslim,
Christian and Buddhist religions are all strongly represented.

And then there is the issue of land, a scarce resource in a
nation of nearly 1.2 billion people.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited two relief camps in
Kokrajhar on Saturday. He called the fighting “a blot” on India, The Associated Press reported, and promised to provide
$3,600 to each family of those killed and $900 to those seriously injured.

Sultan Alam, a member of a Muslim student group in Assam, called for an inquiry by the nation’s top law enforcement
agency. “The minority community here has been ruined by the violence,” he said
in a telephone interview, demanding more benefits for Muslims. “We just want
our rightful share in everything.” A representative of a rival Bodo student
group could not be reached for comment.

Opposition lawmakers accuse the Congress Party, the
dominant party in the governing coalition, of turning a blind eye to the
immigrant issue, since Muslims tend to support the coalition.

Vijay Goel, general secretary of the opposition Bharatiya
Janata Party, said the influence of Muslim immigrants in elections had grown
too great. “We want the illegal immigrants to be identified and deported,” he
said, according to news media reports.

At the news conference, Mr. Gogoi said politics played no
role in his decision making and blamed his political opponents for the
violence. “The situation has flared up because of the N.D.A. regime,” he said,
referring to the National Democratic Alliance, an opposition coalition that
includes the Bharatiya Janata Party. “It is not me who is playing vote bank
politics. I do not need a single vote of the illegal migrants.”

Bengali Muslims have been a significant part of Assam’s population since India’s founding, and separating the recent arrivals from those
who have been in the state for decades would be difficult. Each side in the
conflict has long-held grievances.

Ms. Ganguly said the state should have done far more in
recent years to ease tensions. “This is a battle over resources, not religion,”
she said.

Mr. Gogoi promised action.“The only solution to these waves
of ethnic conflicts is development, and tomorrow the state government will seek
some kind of development package from the prime minister,” Mr. Gogoi said
Friday, joining a long line of state officials seeking more money from India’s central government.

Malavika Vayawahare contributed reporting
from New Delhi, and Samrat from Mumbai, India.

[Pakistani officials have long faced criticism from Americans and Afghans for what they say is their failure to stop militant assaults originating from safe havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.]

ASPEN,
Colo. —Tensions flared between the United
States andPakistanon Friday, as two top officials traded
accusations of doing too little to combat Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan
and Pakistan.

The tart exchange between the officials, Douglas E. Lute,
President Obama’s top adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, took place during a conference in this bucolic mountain
setting.

Under questioning from Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” Ms.
Rehman, speaking on videoconference from Washington, said that Pakistani Taliban fighters, who have taken
refuge in two remote provinces in eastern Afghanistan, were increasingly carrying out rocket attacks and
cross-border raids against Pakistan.

“These are critical masses of people that come in; this is
not just potshots,” Ms. Rehman said. She said that on 52 different occasions in
the last eight months Pakistan had provided to American and NATO commanders in Afghanistan the locations from which the militants were attacking, to
no avail.

Immediately, Mr. Lute, a retired three-star Army general
and deputy national security adviser who rarely speaks in public, fired back.
“There’s no comparison of the Pakistani Taliban’s relatively recent,
small-in-scale presence inside Afghanistan to the decades-long experience and relationship between
elements of the Pakistani government and the Afghan Taliban,” he said. “To
compare these is simply unfair.”

Pakistani officials have long faced criticism from
Americans and Afghans for what they say is their failure to stop militant
assaults originating from safe havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence
directorate.

But in the past several months, Pakistani officials have
started accusing American and allied officials of the same problem coming from Afghanistan.

Just last month, Afghan-based Taliban militants crossed
into Pakistan to kill at least 13 Pakistani soldiers, beheading some of
them, the military said.

A senior Pakistani military official said at the time that
more than 100 Taliban militants armed with heavy weapons had crossed the border
in the attack. After the raid, the militants retreated back into Afghanistan.

Pakistani Taliban fighters fled into Afghanistan starting in the summer of 2009 after a major assault by
the Pakistani military on the SwatValley in northwestern Khyber-PakhtunkhwaProvince.

Many have taken refuge in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, areas where they have
strengthened their presence as American forces have withdrawn. Pakistani
officials say that two senior Taliban commanders — Maulana Fazlullah from Swat
and Faqir Muhammad from Bajaur — are taking refuge there while their fighters
plan attacks in Pakistan.

“We’re feeling a little bit of blowback from ISAF
redeployments along the border,” Ms. Rehman said, referring to the NATO command
in Afghanistan.

The barbed exchange came during a wide-ranging 90-minute
panel discussion in the Aspen Security Forum at the Aspen Institute here. The
New York Times is a media sponsor of the four-day conference. At the beginning
of the session, it seemed that Mr. Lute and Ms. Rehman were intenton building upon the recently agreed deal to reopen NATO
supply linesinto Afghanistan.

Ms. Rehman said that the two countries had experienced “an
extraordinarily difficult period” after an American airstrike killed 24
Pakistani soldiers at an outpost near the Afghan border last November, but that
they were still staunch allies. Mr. Lute said the countries shared the vital
interests of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan.

But the bonhomie did not last long. Ms. Rehman also
criticized the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone strikes in Pakistan, saying they had reached the point of “diminishing
returns” while also whipping up anti-American sentiment in the country.